Michael Cohen: Amateur hour for the pundit class demanding that Obama do 'something' in Ukraine. [View all]

[pampango]

Don't listen to Obama's Ukraine critics: he's not 'losing' – and it's not his fight

...it has been amateur hour back in Washington. I’m talking about the people who won’t stop weighing in on Obama’s lack of “action” in the Ukraine. Indeed, the sea of foreign policy punditry – already shark-infested – has reached new lows in fear-mongering, exaggerated doom-saying and a stunning inability to place global events in any rational historical context.

So while Obama may utilize political capital to ratify the Start treaty with Russia, he’s not going to extend it so save the Crimea. The territorial integrity of Ukraine is not nothing, but it’s hardly in the top tier of US policy concerns.

But this crisis is Putin’s Waterloo, not ours.

Which brings us to perhaps the most bizarre element of watching the Crimean situation unfold through a US-centric lens: the iron-clad certainty of the pundit class that Putin is winning and Obama is losing. The exact opposite is true.

Putin has initiated a conflict that will, quite obviously, result in greater diplomatic and political isolation as well as the potential for economic sanction. He’s compounded his loss of a key ally in Kiev by further enflaming Ukrainian nationalism, and his provocations could have a cascading effect in Europe by pushing countries that rely on Russia’s natural gas exports to look elsewhere for their energy needs. Putin is the leader of a country with a weak military, an under-performing economy and a host of social, environmental and health-related challenges. Seizing the Crimea will only make the problems facing Russia that much greater.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/03/obama-ukraine-russia-critics-credibility

For strong military powers versus weak ones, military conquests are often quite easy in the short run. The problems, expense and complications come in the long run. Russia has 'won' a naval base that it already had a 30-year lease on and control of a province that many Ukrainians may resent losing but brings Russia no particular benefit or than perhaps expanding its territorial boundaries. These marginal "wins" may come at a high price in the long run.

One would assume that Obama will continue to play this smartly and nonviolently which may inflame the "you have to do something" punditry class but is the best strategy in the long run. Let the republicans howl at the moon as much as they want.